This invention relates to avoiding cache misses in performance critical paths, and particularly to identifying instructions that can be classified as delinquent memory operations.
The effective use of processor caches is crucial to the performance of applications. Currently, compiler optimizations have increasingly focused on the memory hierarchy, and a variety of efforts have attempted to reduce cache misses. Experiments show that a very small number of memory referencing instructions cause the vast majority of cache misses which degrade the performance dramatically. We call these instructions delinquent memory operations.
It would be desirable to have methods and computer program products to identify delinquent memory operation instructions for effective cache optimizations, such as data prefetching and data reorganization.